Medal of Honor: Warfighter heads to Somalia for 'Shore Leave'

In the Medal of Honor: Warfighter single-player mission "Shore Leave," Tier 1 Operators are assaulting an Al-Shabaab pirate stronghold on the Somali coast. The mission opens up with a beach siege by boat while our stalwart crew of Stumps and company are under heavy fire.

This particular mission features a diverse array of set pieces and gameplay scenarios that keep things from stagnating and falling into the usual shooter doldrums. What starts as the usual cover-based shootouts eventually segues into breaching heavily defended rooms full of Somali pirates, leading to a portion where you must control a heavily-outfitted drone to clear the debris of a recently bombarded building full of errant pirates.

Shore Leave ultimately culminates in a particularly tense sniper segment where the Tier 1s must clear distant rooftops of RPG-wielding baddies so that a chopper convoy can come in and clean up the town. And by clean up the town I mean shoot every single guy who doesn't have a ZZ Top beard.

In addition to Shore Leave, another single-player mission was available: Hot Pursuit. This mission places players behind the wheel as they chase down a suspect through the streets of Karachi, a massive city in Pakistan.

Danger Close Games tapped talent from EA Canada to help develop this driving mission, which sees a Tier 1 operator tear through vendors and shacks with reckless abandon. Honestly, I felt like kind of a jerk just plowing through peoples' lives like that.

Hot Pursuit has a lot of the same principles seen in Shore Leave – spectacle and large set-piece moments. I was impressed with the mission and the driving felt very solid, not the heavy tank-on-ice vehicle I expected from a driving mission in a shooter. Even though Hot Pursuit is quite the juxtaposition, the mission didn't feel out of place in the slightest. See a trailer of the Hot Pursuit mission after the break.